Firefighters later found the bodies of two men inside the house. Police sources said the men were Samir Zawahri, 55, the owner of the house and the father of the alleged gunman, and one of his adult sons.

Cunningham-Rathner looked on in horror as two cars approached. She said the man pointed his weapon at the first, a Mazda hatchback, and yelled at the driver to stop. Cunningham-Rathner said he motioned for the woman driving the second car to keep moving. When she hesitated, the man opened fire on her silver Infiniti, wounding the driver slightly.

Sisk, the driver in the first car, froze, she said. She knew President Obama was in town for an event a few miles away and thought momentarily the man might be a Secret Service agent. She quickly realized that wasn’t the case.

She begged him to take the car instead. “No. You’re driving,” he said.

Before getting into the passenger’s seat next to Sisk, witnesses said, the gunman fired several shots around the neighborhood with what authorities later said was an “AR-15-style” semiautomatic rifle.

Chief Jacqueline Seabrooks says the gunman who was killed by police had a rifle, a duffel bag full of ammunition magazines and extra weaponry.

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The gunman, dressed all in black and carrying a semi-automatic rifle, walked calmly through the Santa Monica College campus after killing his father, brother at their home and another man near the school, authorities said. He would kill a woman outside the library moments later, before dying from police gunfire.